patrick.net

SQT Says:

I think there’ll be a few “fair-weather” mortgage brokers too…

I wonder how many of these people were day trading in the late 90's?

Fucking shit I'm sick of, "my house is worth $________.00, my house went up ___%".

Lets imagine this, a house made out of bales of money, what does the house look like now and what will it look like 1 yr from now? Missing the roof? New deck?

"I'm always meeting someone who is about to take the test" LOL!

Seems FB's don't have a monopoly on greater fools!

Almost every store has a HELP WANTED sign. But how do you live in Bend if you have those jobs?

Simple. You work TWO of these jobs. Or, if you're one of those laid-off Boomers from last Sunday's NYT article, you refuse such work as "demeaning" and "underpaying" and continue living the good life off your home ATM.

Welcome to the new American post-industrial, globally arbitraged labor market. Here's your nametag.

Finally got around to watching "Cinderella Man" this week. While that happened in the context of a different bubble, the circumstances seemed eerily similar today. (Happy family, big house, seemingly-solid retirement portfolio.) And, I'm hearing service people talk about their investment properties. Sure, I've run into people who have bought before, but the assumption is that someone in a professional career has the income to support this. *cough*

From a survival standpoint, rudimentary job skills and adaptability (including a willingness to work and live "below" one's former station in life) offer the greatest assurance of long term survival.

But I'm getting all apocalyptical again...

including a willingness to work and live “below” one’s former station in life

Like working at a demeaning job?

But I’m getting all apocalyptical again…

Honestly, humanity is inherently evil. I do not have much hope for a better world. Perhaps a biblical end to this world is well deserved?

Peter P,

I don't believe in evil or good outside of individual cultural contexts, so I don't think of humanity as evil, at least not in the biblical sense.

I'm more worried about the situation of a suicidal culture, as posed by Jared Diamond, because we as a culture are unable to respond to the human and environmental realities of our situation. I fear we might just keep polluting and allow disasterous climate change happen, for human population to keep growing and push our available resources to the breaking point, and then it'll all be too late.

See also Roman Empire, Mayan Empire, Northern China, Easter Island, etc...

Speaking of the evil humanity, a guy at a stock forum pointed me to this: http://www.theepochtimes.com/211,111,,1.html

I am absolutely horrified and disgusted. This is worse than combat-related kills and massacres. It's not just the greedy cadres. It's the police, doctors, unsympathetic press and populace. I guess this is one of the reasons why my parents would never go back to China.

I don’t believe in evil or good outside of individual cultural contexts, so I don’t think of humanity as evil, at least not in the biblical sense.

So you believe in Moral Relativism?

I’m more worried about the situation of a suicidal culture, as posed by Jared Diamond, because we as a culture are unable to respond to the human and environmental realities of our situation. I fear we might just keep polluting and allow disasterous climate change happen, for human population to keep growing and push our available resources to the breaking point, and then it’ll all be too late.

Don't worry, be happy. What needs to happen will happen, good or bad. Human civilization goes in cycles and all good things must come to an end.

All bad things must come to an end too....including housing bubbles.

I’m more worried about the situation of a suicidal culture, as posed by Jared Diamond

Unless you're on an island, that's almost confusing the company for the market. The species itself will survive, though cultures may not. Drawing on the synchronicity of Slashdot and digg threads, I'd like to quote one poster who supposed that a motivated group of 24 (educated) people could, in a resource-rich location, get back up to a pre-atomic level of technology in about a decade. (That unfortunately assumes they don't have to play politics with other groups of survivors.)

Don't worry Astrid... If history is any guide, our wasteful and decadent era will be followed by one or more of the following: massive war, genocide, famine or plague. Have a nice weekend! :)

The species itself will survive, though cultures may not.

How about cuisines? :(

@GC,

Isn't the "Epoch Times" a portal for the Falun Gong movement itself? Not saying the Chinese government isn't evil and repressive (it is), just that I'd be a little suspicious of extreme claims, like coerced live organ harvesting from Falun Gong prisoners. This story just sounds a little too urban-mythy for me without some independent sources to back it up. Kind of reminds me of the chain email warning about people waking up in bathtubs full of ice cubes in Vegas --minus one kidney.

What the hell……..the sun will be cold one day anyway…….

There are other suns, and other planets. Until every star is dead, and every mass decayed to cold iron, there is still hope for the species.

I am absolutely horrified and disgusted. This is worse than combat-related kills and massacres. It’s not just the greedy cadres. It’s the police, doctors, unsympathetic press and populace. I guess this is one of the reasons why my parents would never go back to China.

Maybe these folks are affiliated with the ones that harvest moon bear bile,

tinyurl.com/k5fe7

or the ones that force very young girls into prostitution by strapping them to a branch and submerging them up to their armpits in a cesspool full of leaches.

tinyurl.com/hqymr

Ahh the middle kingdom, full of history and mystery.

But I digress, the Chinese are world leaders in the finance of American debtors, clearly we can look the other way on such trivial matters as human rights or basic dignity, can’t we? I mean after all, look at all the cheap crap we get in return.

There are other suns, and other planets. Until every star is dead, and every mass decayed to cold iron, there is still hope for the species.

You really believe in ET's? :)

HARM:

Ever read Niven? He hypothesized that offering people life-through-transplants would encourage people to favor such harvesting programmes for criminals. A depressingly possible future, especially if you already have a culture that places a greater importance on the society than the individual.

Which reminds me... I did see "The Island" in the past month. Yummy!

requiem,

True enough, but that's hardly much comfort for me, since I'm highly unlikely to be amongst that 10.

Although the island effect is most obvious in geographically isolated pockets, there's no reason why similar effects cannot apply on a larger scale. Humanity is on an island, we don't yet have the technology to escape the Earth if we mess it up.

If we do make some sort of breakthrough and do continue on (perchance one day to become an enlightened culture of energy beings operating on a couple double A batteries...well, then I demand reincarnation personally and the ability to continue blogging with you all.

Peter P:

There's plenty of time before the sun goes red giant to spread to other systems. Being able to leach technologies from other species (assuming such exist) would be nice, of course, but not required.

requiem@,

Yes, Larry Niven's one of my favorite sci-fi authors, as he writes in the classic tradition (as in more emphasis on actual science). I would much prefer organ cloning to organ harvesting though. As Peter P would say, stealing someone else's organs invites bad karma. :-)

Still holding out hope for someone to invent "Boosterspice" before I croak, though.

GC,

I don't condone such coerced organ donations. However, I'm not surprised - once they start dehumanizing prisoners as less than human, it's easy to justify harvesting their organ to save "better" people. I under you can understand the position, as you're an admirer to ubermensch and as such, you'd agree that most of human society is mere cattle, there for the use and pleasure of the elite (though potentially dangerous and sometimes difficult to handle).

The end result may well be live organ donation, last seen in Monty Python's Meaning of Life.

On the other side of the slippery slope, why restrict such rights to humans. Why are we still eating veal, and boiling lobsters and crabs, and factory farm raising chicken, and swatting mosquitoes?

But if a "taken" organ can give a party hardy boomer another year on the bong, isn't this in itself a good thing? There are what 2-3 billion chinese, surely they won't miss an organ or two. Think of all the good that can be done by prolonging the boomer bong time. Boomer bong time, even sounds kind of Chinese.

Speaking of the Island, anyone read Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro? I keep meaning to read it, but haven't quite gotten around to it yet.

I think harvesting organs from freshly executed prisoners is well justified. This is partly why I favor hanging over lethal injection.

@astrid, X & requiem,

Again, I'm a little suspicious about the source of that story. Live coerced organ harvesting seems a tad extreme even for the Chinese government. Shooting dissidents and running over student protestors with tanks, sure, but organ harvesting??

Good grief!

Are you sure you people are Californians? You’re giving me a bummer.

Huh?

@Peter P,

Let me translate in Californian: He means to say you're harshing his buzz with all the totally bogus gloom-n-doom talk.

MA,

You're confusing NorCal with SoCal:) Have you checked out the fog coverage in SF during summer?

HARM,

Though I don't believe the source at all, organ harvesting from condemned prisoners would be something 80+% of Mainland Chinese could get behind. Condemned prisoners are gonna die anyways, so why not let their organs "serve society"? China is the land of historic female infanticides and lots of gender selective abortions (and not few female baby crib deaths) to this day. Is coercing a couple condemned organs really so heinous in contrast?

HARM,

I don't generally follow politics on the other side of the Pacific. So I could be fooled.

Peter P,

I am a cultural relativist, in that I believe every society defines its own rules and adjust those rules over time to suit their conditions. I'm not a cultural relativist in that I think people can disobey on the books laws (eg., no bondage, no female circumcision) of the society in which they live.

I may not like how most governments of Africa run their land, but I sure as hell don't want the US imposing its moral authority (if any remains after Abu Ghraib) on these countries.

GC,

Come on! It's the Epoch Times, can you really not know?

I would actually like to get a job in Shanghai (or preferably, bi-coastal btwn Shanghai and SF). China's not really that bad, if you have money and AC and connections and no uncontrollable impulse for social justice.

However, China proper (excluding HK) has no world class city yet.

I really don't know its actual backing. Seriously.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoch_Times

It's basically like the anti-CCP version of a Marxist tabloid rag.

I admit the story is plausible enough and I've heard of similar accounts before. But the source! It's like having the National Inquirer unearth Abu Ghraib. Sure it's a deadly serious matter, but it's the National Inquirer!

MA,

Yes, a common mistake for non-Californians. But really CA is like five or six states cramed in together. Most parts of CA resemble neighboring states (or countries...cough Mexico cough) than they do each other.